My learnings as a Businessman. (Part 20)
Once you have established your business, your focus would be on growing your revenue.
There are various approaches to doing this. Each has its pros and cons.
In my experience, what has worked wonders is this.
Learning No: 22
Be a miner. Before being an explorer.
How does one grow revenue? Should you use a spray and pray technique, cold calling prospects endlessly?
Or should you concentrate your efforts on one client?
Over the last seven years, I have worked on a mining approach, making an entry into a relationship with a client and then expanding the engagement with them.
For example, when we started working with a large multi brand, multinational organization, we started the engagement with one marketing team within the organization.
Slowly, but surely, we expanded our engagement with other teams.
Today, we handle work across the board, with the marketing teams of all their brands. Further, we have also engaged with their HR team, operations team, training team and CSR team.
Mining a client relationship, brings on board some immediate benefits:
You waste less time converting a client:
A client who has already engaged with you, is comfortable dealing with you and your team. So it takes less effort to convince them that you are capable of handling the work. Once there is a level of trust, newer projects and prospective leads from the client, automatically find their way to you, as the client would not want to experiment with new partners every time.
You get referrals:
The best way to pick up new business is referrals. Once you have a great working relationship with one client, they have no problems recommending you to others from their team. A testimonial from a satisfied client ensures that you do not need to prove your credentials over and over again, as internal referrals are more trusted than hours of sales pitches.
Lower cost of sale:
When you run a business, you would learn that the cost of a project is never the direct cost associated with it. It also involves the man-hours required to connect with a client, convince them about your ability, make a sales pitch, negotiate, close the business and then execute the same.
When you add this cost into the equation, getting repeat business from an existing relationship beats cold-calling hands down, as you cut out a very large portion of the business development effort and the time you dedicate to it.
Steady growth comes from mining a client, rather than engaging with new clients every time.
Only once you have achieved the full revenue potential with a client, should you look at engaging with newer clients.
As long as your revenue is growing, it does not matter whether you have 1 or a 1000 customers.
The focus should be on value, rather than on volume.
TO BE CONTINUED…
(This is part 20 of a series of blogs on my learnings as an entrepreneur )
Read Part 21 here
photo credit: tokyoform via photopin cc
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